Dheeraj Tokas's entry into Munirka's political landscape has been nothing less than phenomenal. Particularly so because he is not from the wealthiest or the most connected families in the village. Dheeraj started his career under the aegis of a strong Congress leader, a former member of the legislative assembly (MLA) whose patronage, as many allege, helped Dheeraj to act as the broker for a huge land deal with a prominent real estate company. Rumour has it that the windfall from that land deal changed his fortunes overnight. It was this new-found wealth that helped Dheeraj's political ambitions grow, and he soon started challenging his patrons in the Indian National Congress (INC). After he had fallen out with the INC, his wife, Parmila Tokas, stood independently for the seat of councillor from Munirka in 2012 (as that year, that particular ward was reserved for women candidates) and won it by a stupendous margin. Parmila and Dheeraj were, however, more ambitious. It is common for the nouveau riche to enter municipal-level politics. But the real litmus test is the legislative assembly elections. After Parmila's massive victory, Dheeraj fought elections for the state legislative assembly in 2013 from the Bahujan Samajwadi Party, which he lost rather badly. But right before the 2015 state legislative assembly elections, within two months of joining the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Parmila won the much-coveted AAP ticket for the R. K. Puram constituency with a massive margin of over 19,000 votes. Dheeraj may not have been very successful himself in winning elections, but together with this wife, they seemed to have figured out the ‘trick’ to winning them. Dheeraj handles much of the work, and Parmila's connect with people gets her the votes.

Why Politics?

I shift gears to discussing electoral politics in this chapter because it is pivotal to one's understanding of the social life of rent. Money circulates through multiple registers of meanings and social realities.

The scaling-back, scaling-up, and scaling-down of liberal nation states since the 1970s have fundamentally changed the contexts in which state responses to squatting must be understood. The impacts of neoliberalism, globalization, and localism – scaling-back, scaling-up, and scaling-down the nation-state – have provoked new questions for liberal property theories. While the foundations of the classical nineteenth century liberal state and twentieth century liberal ownership societies – which underpin liberal theories of private property – have shifted, the “invisibility” of the state in liberal property theories has meant that this fundamental change has attracted relatively little attention. Against the backdrop of the global financial crisis and Great Recession, the politics of “austerity” and affordable housing crises, the re-emergence of squatting as an issue of political concern and the use of state power to respond to unlawful occupation have re-positioned debates about “private property” in the public realm. For property scholarship to succeed in understanding and advancing solutions to contemporary property problems, it is important that our theoretical and methodological frameworks are attuned to the real contexts of state action.

The options available to states to respond to squatting, including through law, are wide-ranging, sometimes dynamic and always revealing of the complex relationships between land, housing and shelter, poverty and ownership, citizenship and exclusion in each jurisdiction, in particular moments. The legal tools adopted and applied in response to squatting vary by jurisdiction (and within jurisdictions, by level of state action, for example, local vs national), and over time. In this chapter we introduce key elements within legal responses to homeless squatting in each of five jurisdictions that we draw on to inform our analysis throughout the book: Ireland, England and Wales, South Africa, Spain and the United States of America. In drawing examples and illustrations from a range of diverse jurisdictions, we aim to follow the advice of Van der Walt and Walsh, to pay: “…close attention to jurisdictional differences, and to broader social, economic and cultural considerations not always apparent from the face of constitutional texts, legislative provisions or even judicial decisions.” Our aim in this chapter is to set out the “legal base-line” for the book, locating these laws in their historical, geographical and social context. In doing so, we introduce an array of potential legal responses to squatting: including regularization of unlawful occupation (enabling the squatter to acquire rights in land), and a range of civil actions and criminal sanctions targeted at unlawful occupiers or absent owners.

While the institution of private property is a central institution of the liberal state, the role of the state is necessarily, and paradoxically, de-centered in accounts of liberal property law. The rhetorical power of ownership relies on the de-politicization of property rights, positioning the question of entitlements and the protection of the status quo of private property above, or prior to, the law. In periods of relative stability the relationships between private property, political ideologies, state legitimacy and authority are relegated from the “public realm” of political and legal debate to the “private sphere” of interpersonal relations between individuals. Indeed, the resilience of the liberal state is rooted in the taken-for-granted assumption that private property rights (as defined by the dominant narrative) will, and must, be upheld. However, in an age of crisis, “settled” liberal nation states, including the USA and the UK, economic setbacks, social movement protests, and civil unrest, have called into question the relationships between property relations, on the one hand, and the authority and legitimacy of state actions and institutions, on the other. This chapter explains how “Resilient Property” approach and methodology focuses directly on state action in responding to property problems, particularly in moments of crisis.

Beenu was an affable man, and rather quick witted. Since he had seen his father run a brick kiln, and dabbled in the transport business, real estate and local financing himself, I asked him to tell me what the experience of seeing things changing so drastically right before his eyes had been like. He responded with a smile,

The contradiction that Beenu had drawn was not merely a spatial one. There is a world of difference between the city and the village. People of South Delhi belong to the upper middle class and might even be considered the city's elite. Businessmen to government officials to members of the cultural and intellectual elite inhabit the many localities of South Delhi—all built on the agricultural lands of these villages. The villagers, however, may have money, but they do not embody the cultural capital that defines South Delhi. Both the city and the village have become cosmopolitan spaces, with aspirations that are quite ‘urban’, with inhabitants moving in and out of them seamlessly. This blurs the conceptual borders between urban and rural without erasing them, while also producing differences and hierarchies spatially. It also messes up identities. Proud Jat men find themselves derided in an urbanised world.

In this chapter, we explain the methodological frame and normative hypothesis of Resilient Property, drawing on wicked problem theory, vulnerability theory and equilibrium theory. Structuring methods drawn from wicked problem theory and “method assemblage” are adopted to support fuller analyses of the complex array of relations and practices, individual and institutional vulnerabilities that are at stake when homeless squatters occupy empty property. Resilient Property draws insights from “vulnerability theory”: adopting Fineman’s general approach to vulnerability and resilience; and building on her insights concerning institutional vulnerability, including the vulnerability of the state. This provides a central anchor for our analyses of state responses to squatting: that a necessary implication of recognizing that the state itself is a vulnerable institution is that we recognize the need for states (and governments) to act in ways that build their own resilience, to shore up their authority and legitimacy in the face of conflict or crises. This underpins our focus on “equilibrium” in Resilient Property: recognizing that states are not neutral arbiters in relation to competing claims to land but are required to negotiate their “other-regarding” responsibilities – adjudicating and allocating resilience to individuals and institutions – against the backdrop of their own “self-regarding” need for resilience. Through this approach, Resilient Property enables us to develop a realistic, contextualized, conceptualization of state action with regard to complex property problems.

Political and property crises open up vital new questions for property theorists, and analyses of state responses to these crises cast new light on how property systems, and property law, adapt and evolve to meet complex challenges – while remaining institutionally resilient themselves. Resilient Property draws on equilibrium theory to understand how resilience is produced, for states and for individuals. In this postscript, we reflect on the property crises we are currently collectively facing, across the world: the impact, and aftermath of the global coronavirus pandemic. Applying the lens of our Resilient Property theory, we examine the emergency measures adopted by several governments as the pandemic threatened the health and wellbeing of citizens on a scale that was unprecedented for most of our lifetimes. As “stay-in-place” orders, including the provision of emergency shelter for unhoused or precariously housed people, collided with an upsurge in vacant commercial buildings and stalled development projects, the perfect property storm of homelessness, squatting and empty buildings/land was brought into fresh relief. Through a Resilient Property lens, state responses to property problems in the pandemic reveal the resilience needs that states were confronted with during the crisis, and the actions they took to maintain and restore equilibrium through the shockwaves of the pandemic and its aftermath

Balbir Singh, a resident of Shahpur Jat, then a village in the outskirts of Delhi, remembers the time when land acquisition began taking place in the year 1958. The news had first come to them wafting in as a rumour, but it grew limbs and fangs to become reality soon enough. He remembers having accompanied a group of villagers headed by Dalip Singh Panwar, a local Congress leader, to appeal to Jawaharlal Nehru, the then prime minister, to not acquire the land. Nehru had merely thrown up his hands in despair, expressing his helplessness in the matter and said, ‘Badhte hue bachhe aur badhte hue shahar ko main nahi rok sakta.’

There probably could be no better analogy than the one Nehru had used. In the life of a newly independent nation, in the heyday of Nehruvian socialism, cities were indeed like children. They needed to be nurtured, nourished and sacrificed for. It is entirely another matter that cities as we know them today are less like growing children and more like insatiable monsters, which demand blood sacrifices on a regular basis. Their appetite for resources has only grown exponentially. So much so that these monstrous cities devour almost everything that falls in their way. And while cities devour and keep growing bigger, they end up changing the entire morphology of the spaces that they consume. Quite like how Nehru saw the fate of these villages in Delhi's hinterlands, the question of rural dispossession has been treated akin to ‘collateral damage’. For the monstrous city, the periphery is the space waiting, like a sacrificial goat, for its turn to be consumed. But zooming closer, the city appears more like a bored and slow sloth, which creates a trail of half-eaten, half-chewed out debris. In the process, urbanisation does not look like a sharp, linear transition, but rather a curious mosaic made of such semi-devoured landscapes.

In the introduction we describe the “wicked” global property problem of homeless squatting on empty land or in empty properties and outline some key themes explored in the book. We reflect on the nature of squatting as a property problem; and introduce the concept of “scale,” which we deploy throughout the book to describe the dynamic nature of state responses to squatting. We outline the importance of seeing “the state” in the analyses of squatting and other property problems, through its interactions with individuals, interactions with other state-bodies, and interactions with its territory, and interactions with its own institutions. Finally, we set out the structure and approach followed in the book, including reference to five primary jurisdictions: the USA, Ireland, Spain, South Africa and England and Wales.

Lakshmi is a woman in her seventies who belongs to the Nai community. She came to Munirka as an 11-year-old bride in the 1960s. Her husband had a barber shop in Tilak Nagar, West Delhi, before he got a job with the Central government. When I spoke to her, Lakshmi seemed oddly fixated on high-lying areas ‘jahan paani nahi jamta’. She muses that the capital was moved to Delhi from Calcutta only because the city is situated at a height and therefore water does not stagnate in Delhi. Munirka, according to her, is also a far better place than a suburb like Dwarka for the same reason. Even her memories of her natal place, a village near Palam, are strongly tied to recollections of waterlogging. This impression of a relationship between topography of land and its value stood out for me during our conversation because it was so unique. No other person I had spoken to had made such associations.

I soon got a better sense of the reason for Lakshmi's preoccupation with low-lying areas and waterlogging. She owns a building right in the middle of Munirka village, which one can access only after crossing several meandering narrow lanes. Left to myself, I would never be able to trace my steps back to her house. She lives with her son on the ground floor of the same building. The floors above have been rented out. There is no separate entrance, so there is a constant flow of people going up and down through the living room. In order to ensure that the lanes were not awash with rain and sewage water during the monsoons, resurfacing was done repeatedly to make them higher, so much so that Lakshmi's ground floor has now sunk to a level below that of the lane. This is not a problem unique to Munirka. Unauthorised coloniesacross Delhi, built on cheaper, unused, low-lying land increasingly suffer from the same issue. Lakshmi's house faces chronic seepage on the ground floor, and she fears that the entire structure and its foundation have considerably weakened.

Four hundred square yards of land in Mohammadpur-Munirka, owned by a Murli Manohar and a Gordhan Dass, was set to be acquired around 1989. The brothers decided to put up a fight and file a counter claim under Sections 9 and 10 of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, of 1 crore rupees as compensation, in addition to solatium and interest. The land acquisition collector knew the drill by then. The formula of coming to a just compensation had evolved to calculating average land prices for the last five years before the land had been notified. According to the collector, most of the land sales had happened in 1984 and the average price was 44 rupees per square yard. No sale was reported during 1985–87. The collector noted, however, that in 1988, one sale had taken place for 1,900 rupees per square yard. On this issue, the collector writes,

There has been increases in prices of land from time to time but no reliance can be placed on the solitary sale deed executed from the year as the prices would not have jumped so much from Rs. 44 per sq. yard to Rs. 1900 per sq. yard during a span of 4 years.

Therefore, 1984 prices of 44 rupees per square yard were held as the baseline for calculating land values in 1989. The brothers were only awarded 39,901 rupees as compensation at the rate of 65 rupees per yard. The hike in 1988 was brushed off as bewildering. The collector saw nothing that could possibly explain why land values could go up so much.

What could possibly have led to such price hikes is anybody's guess. The 1980s was a phenomenal period in Delhi's urbanisation. The 1982 Asian Games, the 1984 Sikh Riots and the construction of a new airport terminal in 1986 presumably created heavy incentives for quick land deals at speculative values in this decade. The land acquisition awards attempted to remain silent on these urban developments.